Preliminary Programme

To what extent did the shared beliefs espoused by sexologists across Europe – such as the notion that sex for women should take place in the context of an established marriage and be fundamentally about reproduction – influence how bodies were managed in post-war Europe? This paper analyses the exchange of ideas between sexologists, psychiatrists, educators and lawyers hailing from countries across Europe at the Prague Sexological Symposium in 1968 and at the Christopher Tietze International Symposium in 1985 to assess how academics and medical practitioners were able to influence policies pertaining to abortion and contraception. This paper uses published conference proceedings, the printed works of sexologists, and the personal correspondence between academics from the German Democratic Republic, Prague, Poland and the United Kingdom to demonstrate that sexologists in both East and West Europe expressed ultimately restrictive views pertaining to women’s sex lives, advocating for predominantly male pleasure. Departing from conceptualising the views of sexologists in East and West Europe in a dichotomous fashion (Lišková 2016, 2018) and considering gendered dynamics in detail, such as the fact that most sexologists were men, helps us to greater understand how sex, and its important relationship to health and individual wellbeing, was managed in similar ways across post-war Europe. This paper also aims to demonstrate that in order to fully understand the influence of historical reproductive policies on beliefs and practices about gender roles and sex today, we must not only consider the influence of well-established historical actors, such as the Catholic Church and political parties, but also the beliefs and research in the discipline of sexology (Show less)

This presentation aims to discuss the transnational dissemination of discourses related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction through international socialist networks. It reflects on the medicalisation of sex and fertility in connection with the health cultures produced by socialism in Ecuador and Peru focusing on the experience of women from different sociocultural and ethnic backgrounds. (Show less)

What was regarded as private when human reproduction was at stake? In this presentation we examine how women's bodies were treated in the context of reproductive care in the post-war Netherlands and Hungary: in the areas of family planning, infertility treatment, and abortion. In our comparative analysis of the Dutch and Hungarian experience we will also highlight the legacies of the post-war policies in the 21st century.

In the Netherlands, civil society played an instrumental role in ensuring the acceptance of sexuality and reproduction as integral parts of human existence. Civil society movements contributed to securing local and national government support and organization of reproductive care services; they helped breaking the Dutch taboo on family planning and the 1963 removal of legal restrictions on contraceptives; and their campaign for women to be “baas in eigen buik” (boss in own belly) enhanced access to safe abortion in 1970. While equity and solidarity in access to care constituted underlying principles along with de-medicalization of pregnancy and reproduction, were these principles accompanied by emphasis on women’s privacy?

The socialist conception of free health care and maternal care provided some security for women in Hungary. Nevertheless, reproduction was linked to demographic concerns and agendas, and treatment provided free of charge at the point of delivery did not include considerations for intimacy, dignity, and privacy. With a focus on women's privacy, the paper explores why this concept was almost entirely missing during the state socialist period. (Show less)

Since Shulamith Firestone’s radical feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex was first published in 1970, her revolutionary demand to “free[] women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available” has been highly contested. Arguing for the development of reproductive technologies to a point that would allow for extra-uterine reproduction, Firestone imagined a post-revolutionary world in which childbearing and -raising would be diffused throughout society and no longer confined to the nuclear familial sphere. Anticipating criticism of this utopian (or, depending on the reader’s perspective, dystopian) vision, Firestone warned that “the misuse of scientific developments is very often confused with technology itself,” thereby admitting to the danger of this technology being mishandled while emphasizing its essential potential as an emancipatory tool.

This view of technology as an ambiguous yet potentially liberating force was, for a brief moment and to a much lesser degree than in the US-American context, also present in West German second-wave feminist debates. In 1983, Irene Stoehr, in the West Berlin-based feminist magazine Courage, hailed artificial reproduction as “the victory of feminism”: “test-tube and freezer are steps on the way to the liberation of having children from heterosexual sex.” However, as Stoehr realized, she was quite isolated in her optimistic view of technology. Noting the virtual impossibility of regarding the new reproductive technologies in this positive light within the New Women’s Movement, she resignedly asked: “But who still remembers Shulamith Firestone?” More fervently calling out this turn away from the Firestonian utopia of the liberation of women from the confines of biology, the feminist scholar Silvia Kontos in 1985 adamantly inquired: “Why is it no longer possible in the women’s movement to think about the possible gain of autonomy the new reproductive technologies could mean for women, why is Shulamith Firestone’s fantasy of test-tube procreation (…) only considered as a spawn of a male-technocratic brain?”

Taking this question seriously, my paper traces this noted hostility toward (reproductive) technology in the 1980s West German feminist movement. Why did it become impossible to view these technologies as potentially liberating forces, as possibilities for autonomy rather than threats, engineered by the “techno-patriarchy”, aimed at disempowering and “eliminating” women? What does the concept of technology designate in these debates? What are the cultural-intellectual roots of this debate? And what are the specifically German tones in it?

Explaining the specific conceptualization of technology that marked the West German women’s movement of the 1980s by firmly situating it in the context of 20th-century German (intellectual) history, I argue that this marked techno-skepticism fulfilled a two-fold historico-political function: On the one hand, it served as a symbolic defense against the Nazi past as the Holocaust had come to be understood as a distinctly modern event that was predicated on and implemented through technological advances. On the other hand, it served as a subcutaneous continuation of certain lebensphilosophical and völkisch patterns of argumentation that identified German identity with nature, spirit, soul and against technology, science and the rational. (Show less)